Re-entry...

...to the blogging world.... I want back! Am I allowed?  Am I welcome?  Will I commit?  

These are questions that have plagued me, not exactly leading me back to the keyboard, but that I’ve been ruminating on as I’ve gone some SEVEN MONTHS with no words, not a peep from me. I can name several reasons, even more excuses, for this blogging abstinence, but none of them feel completely honest.  I could say that at first, I was enjoying homecoming, and then next, I got pregnant (yay! but oh, the fatigue...), then there was what I now refer to as The Dark Ages (more commonly known as “terrible twos”), and then I was just busier and busier with work.  All true. But I’ve been living without expression. Lots of inhales, no exhales. No outlet, no production of anything truly my own. The most I’ve been able to muster have been Facebook status updates, which hardly count. Having stepped away from it, things I now know about blogging:

1. Even if I have an audience of one (i.e. me and me alone), blogging helps me feel understood, less alone.

2. Blogging is not the same as journaling. For many reasons, the primary being the “stage” of it (at least potential for public viewing), the access to it, the ease and convenience of storing thoughts on the web, the risk of it, and the physical process of it (typing vs. the more traditional pen-on-leatherbound-journal).

3. Blogging is a practice. A practice in many senses of the word: doing more of it makes the process easier, more fluid; it can be something you return to in some interval, and the ritual of doing so makes it feel healing; and it can become a part of a rhythm of the lived daily (or at least weekly) experience.

4. Though blogging may be viewed as being trendy, it really is a very old form of expression (writing) with a modern twist (web publishing) that has the potential to make us more reflective and thoughtful and as well as create connections among us in new ways.

5. I admire bloggers who continue to show up at their keyboards. The ones I follow continue to surprise and teach me things.

I want to be someone who continues to show up. Here, in this space. So, I return. 


I usually do.